Bush apologizes

Bush, in Europe the other day, apologized for the U.S's and Allies' historical mistake made during the Yalta Conference, which resulted in the Allies conceding the Baltic states to the Soviet Union, resulting in fifty years of oppression by the Soviets. The primary person responsible was Franklin Roosevelt, and Roosevelt missed the opportunity to bring democracy to those states, and perhaps even to the Soviet Union. Bush said it's time to right those wrongs, and finally liberate the region fully from the vestiges of Soviet control. Sounds like a nice idea, but it's dangerously - frighteningly - simplistic.
Adoption of this infantile reading of history has long been the Right-wing's dream. It makes history the result of Big Historical Actors who make history as they see fit - an attitude explicitly embraced by the Bush Administration. An Administration official was quoted as saying that the Administration's making history, and it's up to others to judge the results. It's harder to find an purer example of megalomania. By interpreting history in this fashion (more representative of historical analysis 150 years ago), Bush gets to blame Roosevelt for oppression in the former Soviet Union and the Cold War, and set himself up as the Anti-Roosevelt, the bringer of democracy to the oppressed.
Bush tragically, weepingly, seems unaffected by the horror and trauma of the second World War, or by the Herculean efforts by the Allied leaders and their people - all of them - to bring peace to the globe. He seems unable to grasp what it was like to work to end the most calamatous event in human history. The scale of the loss of life and the magnitude of the tragedy appears completely lost on the president. But the sacrifices made by the millions during the war are trivialized when he contorts history to meet his ends. The fact that he feels he needs to apologize - on behald of the US and before the entire world no less, as if somehow ending World War II was botched, fills me with disgust. For Bush to lay the blame for the emergence of the Soviet bloc on Roosevelt, to the exclusion of even Stalin (and to say nothing about the forces of history) is to commit an intellectual crime, of betrayal of truth by denying its complexity.
Bush even chided Putin for his undemocratic tendencies - kind of like the neighboorhood bully chiding Mike Tyson for his dopey tattoo - from the other side of the planet. It's not going to result in any change, it will probably result in more intransigence, and the people who suffer will be Russians (not anyone Bush knows). Suppose Bush suspected his neighbor was beating his wife. Would he go over, goad bad mouth wife abusers in general (while transparently referring to the neighbor), insult their masculinity, express some vague threats, then go home to his own safe house, leaving the wife to face the consequences?
Consequences are not part of the Bush analysis. Bush ignores the (predictable and predicted) consequences of the breakup of the Soviet Union: long-supressed religious and ethnic hatreds erupted in a bloodbath. The "consequences" as of this moment? Totalitarianism is now the exception rather than the rule, most of the religious/ethnic bloodthirst has been slaked or supressed and anemic democracies are surviving, for now. History does not come in neat packages, except in Bush's world.
This kind of historical interpretation invites megalomania, a black-and-white view of history, and the resulting dangerous black-and-white view of right and wrong. It's the kind of silliness which attributes the breakup of the USSR to the deceitful and poisonous Ronald Reagan, the "opening up" of China to crook and quitter Richard Nixon, and the task of bringing democracy to the world to reckless and simple George W. Bush. To top it all off, it provides someone to blame and offers simple answers, always staples of Right-wing conversation.
The Right's trying to rewrite science - to the alarm and dismay of the scientific community - not only for the preposterous creationism idea, but in dozens of other areas as well. They're trying to rewrite law with the resurgent doctrine of Constitutional originalism. And once again they've set their sights on rewriting history. Backwards- march!